The Night Fell Off Your Mind
by firstbreaths
Summary: The twist of her wrist is sharper, more forceful as she squeezes out the oranges; he's always said she casts spells like a lover.


**A/N: **Originally written for museme87's Stag and Doe comment ficathon on LJ.

* * *

><p>James wakes up in an unfamiliar bed, fingers grasping at air that burns his fingers with all the horror of its silence; even in sleep, Lily is uninhibited and noisy, her body like a pulse point under his fingers, thrumming, murmuring gently and warm to touch.<p>

He gropes for his wand and glasses on the nightstand, swallowing around the sudden dryness in his throat, Lily isn't, Lily _can't_ -

The mere thought of it is like being submerged into an ocean and then pushed, flailing and grasping, back above the waves, all at the same time. It's –- James doesn't know, really; it's so many things that he's unable to sit still and numb, all at once.

His other hand catches in the sheets for a moment, fingers scrabbling for any sense of purpose, and it's the flimsy feeling of silk slipping between them that reminds James of what he is, where he is, and what Lily's sister most definitely does not want him to be. It's –- not here, nobody knows that they're here except Sirius (and possibly the bartender who'd overheard their drunken soiree about the implications of fucking the bridesmaid, even if it's mainly to reassure said bridesmaid that pink doesn't clash with her hair as much as she thinks it will, which -), and there's hope just in the fact that he _dares_ to hope, really.

It's all too easy to remember a day when hope was Lily Evans maybe thinking of him as something other than an enemy, than an acquaintance, than a friend. When hope was them being together, instead of them being together and hoping that a war wouldn't make them strangers again.

James hears a noise downstairs -– so quiet he probably wouldn't have picked it up, a year ago -– and slips out of bed, padding slowly across the plush carpet. He stows his wand in his pocket; deliberately doesn't think of Vernon and Petunia upstairs, eschewing the very thing that could save them. The hallway is long and seemingly endless in its silence until he catches a glimpse of Lily, her back to him in the kitchen as she squeezes the juice from an orange, emptying it into a glass. Her t-shirt is crumpled and hangs loose about her shoulders, her smile turned sloppy and wider than he's seen it in a while.

James gets it –- the insatiable need for something to do; the feeling that Sirius describes as being Padfoot, with a constant itch in places his paws can't quite reach to scratch. It settles in all of them, deeper than their skin yet constantly humming, just under the surface.

He stops in the stairwell for a moment, leaning back against the antique dresser and just watching in a way he hasn't for too long. It's funny –- he'd seen Lily Evans for the first time in a haze of smoke from the Hogwarts Express, distinguishable only by a mop of red hair in a colour he'd wanted to desperately wanted to be able to name and the fact that she was quite obviously trying so hard not to be, really. At eleven, he'd almost wanted to look at anything else because he didn't understand, at fourteen he _couldn't_ look at anything else because he understood too well; at nineteen it's his choice to do either, and yet –-

They're both so busy, and so worried, and so tired that he rarely gets the chance.

The twist of her wrist is sharper, more forceful as she squeezes out the oranges; he's always said she casts spells like a lover. There's a pun in there somewhere about their love being like magic that doesn't really make sense to James because he's never been completely and utterly _gobsmacked_ by magic like she has, but it makes sense too; life is magic and magic is life and all of these things are Lily.

James is fascinated by the way the muscles in her arms tense as she switches to grinding the juice from grapefruits, her fingers slender and graceful but with a strength he knows from all the times she's gripped him tight by the wrist, yanking him from danger, by the way she stands tall and unassuming, but with that glint in her eye, like she's almost daring someone to discover her and ask what she's doing. Her focus is narrow, even as she moves to brush her hair away from her eyes, to scratch absentmindedly at her shoulder blade, smearing grapefruit juice sticky and bright into the juncture between her neck and collarbone until he has the vaguely obscene urge to kiss at it, mouthing hot and wet along the column of her throat.

So he does, crossing the room in two long strides and settling himself behind her, chest to back and chin to shoulder blade, their hands intertwined over the fruit. Lily doesn't question, just does, turning into his embrace like she was made to be there, folded up and tucked against James like a letter in his breast pocket, a truth only he could hold. James' heart skips a beat at the easiness of it all; after so long trying to find a moment of solace between ducking spells and waiting for Sirius to leave the flat they all share, he's thrown out of the frenzied rhythm they've come to into a lilting crescendo that, even after so long, still comes naturally.

They stand like that for a while, pressed together in an unfamiliar kitchen while Lily squeezes oranges, laughing low in her throat every time James moves to take her hands back in his, swatting him away in a move that thrills him with its familiarity. The orange juice is bitter and full of pips; James just grins and kisses at the stains it leaves against her lips –- it's the best he's ever tasted.


End file.
